[WikiEN-l] Re: Writing with our readers in mind

[Michael Turley]

On 7/12/05, Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 01:15:42PM -0000, Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
> > > Starting from when I was a small child reading them on the living room
> > > floor, I've never fully grasped the reasons why an encyclopedia was
> > > not just a superset of the dictionary.
>         [snip]
> > But an encyclopedia tries to be somewhat independent of all this. It
> > tries to split the world up into concepts that make sense from the
> > point of view of our current state of knowledge. Those tails that have
> > enough in common to be usefully described together should form one
> > article, both in an English encyclopedia and an Icelandic one.
> 
> Maybe.  But while the structure of our language might not overwhelmingly
> determine the thoughts that we can have in it (the infamous Sapir-Whorf
> conjecture) it certainly determines which thoughts are easier to
> communicate to readers of the same language.
> 
> It seems to me that the central difference between a dictionary and an
> encyclopedia is that a dictionary is about the language, whereas an
> encyclopedia is about the world.  A dictionary sets out not to describe
> the world in which language-users live, but rather the language that
> they use to describe that world.  So a dictionary entry on the words
> "God" or "justice" does not need to discuss the issue of whether God
> exists, or whether justice can be accomplished -- only with what people
> _mean_ when they say or write "God" or "justice".
> 
> A dictionary uses language as meta-language:  that is, to describe the
> language itself.  An encyclopedia uses language in the ordinary fashion:
> to describe the world.

Since languages are part of the greater world around them, and words
are parts of that world, I still think encyclopedias that do not
incorporate dictionaries are falling a little short of what they could
be.

In your example of a "frog", the dicdef could be the disambiguation
page that leads to the encyclopedic discussion of the amphibian, the
slang term for a French person, and even the use as a clothes
fastener.  Every word would be defined, and those with further
specific use would be simply have a larger article, or have several
child articles linked under them.

We already start many (perhaps even most) articles with a definition
of the term being discussed.   The primary difference I see is that
some of these "header definitions" could better serve the readers as
less specific disambiguation pages.

Although "frog" isn't the best example (and I can't think of a better
one on the spot right now), why *wouldn't* we present someone looking
up "frog" with the pronunciation and etymology of the word, along with
three branches to follow for a fuller explanation?  Isn't this much
better than having articles "Frog", "Frog (slang)" and "Frog
(fastener)" whose title only offers the barest description of what to
expect from the link?

The word is part and parcel of the overall value of the named concept
in the world, and therefore is also encyclopedic.  Encyclopedic
phrases that define a concept don't belong in a dictionary, but I
don't see a valid opposite corollary.

I still see a dictionary as a subset of a "true" encyclopedia.  I
suspect that this hasn't been considered for adoption as part of the
larger goal of Wikipedia in part because it is far more difficult (and
usually less interesting) to accomplish than producing encyclopedia
articles.

I don't know for sure where the "not a dictionary" part of [[WP:NOT]]
came from, but suspect it came from Mr. Wales.  I'd be interested to
know *why* being a superset of a dictionary is so taboo.

-- 
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused